Word: mozarts
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Consider what happens when a modern symphony orchestra and soloist perform a Mozart piano concerto. The string section, often much larger than any Mozart had at his disposal, blasts out its parts on violins and cellos better suited to powerful Strauss tone poems. The wind instruments are louder and more penetrating than classical flutes, oboes and clarinets and more complex in their mechanisms. The piano, a huge concert grand with a booming bass, is worlds removed from its gentler 18th century forerunner. In this welter of sound, inner voices are lost, delicate balances are destroyed. Exciting as the performance might...
This is no dusty, scholarly discipline but the restorative obsession of passionate musicians. "When I heard Hogwood's cassette of Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony on original instruments the other day," says Albert Fuller, an enthusiastic participant in the movement, "it made me feel hot inside-drop-dead, roll-around, fall-over, lava hot." The sense of excitement is immediate and infectious, and the original-instruments movement is now beginning to have an effect on the way standard repertory is performed. "On instruments, one hears the composers almost for the first time," says John Eliot Gardiner...
...origins of the movement extend back to Mendelssohn's historic revival of J.S. Bach in 1829. Even so, throughout the last century Bach was known primarily to the most sophisticated musicians, and only a handful of Mozart's myriad works were regularly performed. With composers like Schumann, Brahms and Wagner churning out masterwork after masterwork, there was little need to revive the past. But as the musical repertory gradually evolved into a monument to the 19th century, inquiring performers began to look backward. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), an English musician and instrumentmaker, rediscovered the nearly forgotten world...
Today's original-instrument performers are Landowska's heirs. Once considered the last refuge of a poor musician, authentic instruments now attract performers of international caliber: Dutch Violinist Jaap Schroder, who collaborated with Hogwood on the Mozart symphony series, the English Concert's Pinnock, a top-notch harpsichordist whose reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations is perhaps the most convincing on discs; American Pianist Malcolm Bilson, one of the leading exponents of classical keyboard music, which he plays on the fortepiano, a predecessor of the modern instrument. "Everybody understands that there must be different sopranos...
...time soon to trade in their modern instruments for softer-toned period pieces, which cannot project well in large concert halls. "Every great artist in the world plays on modern instruments. Name one who uses authentic instruments," challenges Gerard Schwarz, music adviser to New York's Mostly Mozart Festival, which uses conventional instruments. Neville Marriner, for years conductor of London's Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, also criticizes the authenticity movement. "Music played on the instruments composers would have known is very popular with the open-toed-sandals-and-brown-bread set," cracks Marriner...